Review Summary: Pyres' debut full-length Year of Sleep is a must for anyone with even the slightest interest in sludge metal. Toronto may have just supplanted Savannah.
Pyres is a post-slash-progressive sludge metal band from Toronto, Canada and their debut album, Year of Sleep, is absolutely stunning. One moment smack in the middle of the nine and a half minute long title track actually affected me physically on first listen, in a way no other piece has come close to doing in my 35-plus years of listening to heavy music. But more on that later.
Initially, Pyres sounds like Black Tusk meets Isis meets Iron Maiden, and for the most part that rough comparison remains fairly accurate, but over the course of Year of Sleep the band reveals a musical deftness, sophistication and sense of purpose rare in seasoned acts, let alone present on a debut full-length (there’s apparently a 4-song demo out there somewhere). They are not necessarily breaking any new sonic ground, in fact strong reminders of the bands mentioned above as well as the likes of Baroness, Mastodon, Tool, and even such groups as Sonic Youth and Helmet abound, but the various elements of the six songs on Year of Sleep are put together and presented in such a way that the overall result is astonishingly fresh and compelling. At times, the mash of styles brings to mind bands like The Ocean, yet the transitions are so glass-smooth and all the pieces so perfectly drive each song towards its seemingly natural conclusion that sudden shifts from the deepest, darkest doom sludge to flighty, prog-metal-esque, dual-guitar wankery are not the least bit jarring.
The opening track, ‘Proximity Alert’, does a brilliant job of quickly setting this album up. A multi-layered, chorus-infused feedback drone rises to introduce a steamroller drum beat. The drums are crisp, deep, and full. Already, the album sounds huge. Then the guitar comes in. Dark, yet bright. Chunky, yet catchy. And oh so big. And just when the heavy deliciousness is starting to sink in, the bass enters - along with a second massive guitar. At this point, the game is on. The sheer fullness, richness, loudness, and yet crystalline clarity of these opening moments is pure metal dopamine. A shot straight to the brain for anyone who loves Matt Bayles’ work with Isis and Mastodon (and Year of Sleep’s remaining thirty-nine or so minutes only continue to take you higher). By the end of the first minute of ‘Proximity Alert’, the main riff is introduced and it is scrumptious, one that wouldn’t be totally out of place on ASG’s latest album, the ridiculously sublime and anthemic Blood Drive.
At this point, the vocals enter and they are pure growl (and stay that way for the whole record). Now, OK, let me just get this out of the way: I’m not a vocals guy. There’s an old adage (and I think it’s maybe a Stones song or lyric as well; I could be mistaken) that ‘It’s the singer not the song’. Well, I’m of the opposite school. I rarely (there’s exceptions to everything) give a cockroach’s fart about the singing, or even the lyrics for that matter. Scream, growl, bleat, or howl, it’s all about the band as a whole, period. So having said that, yeah, the vocals are growled. There you go. That’s all I’ll say about them, except (see?) that at times, Andrew Wilson really manages to tailor the phrasing of the lyrics to the music in surprisingly unexpected and almost catchy ways, so much so that I actually pulled out the lyrics to follow along during one listen of the title track. So I suppose, then, that I’d have to consider the growled vocals above-average, in that they inspired me to check out what they were actually saying. There.
The remainder of the opening track is fantastic - I’m not going to dwell on particulars - with wonderful twists and turns. By the end, you’re hooked. It is undoubtedly a killer song. You wouldn’t be wrong to want to go back and play it again before continuing. In fact, that might be a good idea. Not because the rest of the album doesn’t stand up to it, but because the rest of the album blows it away.
I need to spend some time talking about the title track, so I’ll just (sort of) briefly touch on Year of Sleep’s four other songs, all supremely powerful and truly brilliant. ‘Deserter’s Maiden-like dual-guitar opening contains only the faintest whisper of the soul-crushing fury and sonic density that follows. The fourth cut, ‘Atlas Cast No Shadow’, introduces an almost Middle-Eastern guitar flavor, displayed here as a slow, trancey opening, which appears later (the flavor does), in very different form, over pure thrash metal in album-closer ‘The Everbearing’. ‘Atlas’ also contains one of the album's real treats, when, at right about the halfway mark, Andrew Wilson comes over the top of an unaccompanied guitar riff with an almighty ‘Uuh!’, perfectly setting you up for a thumping up-tempo mosh-type riff . . . which doesn’t happen. Instead, the monster riff is sloth-slow. It’s like you slammed on the brakes and are being restrained by the seatbelt. And just when you settle into that heavy crawl, theeennnn the accelerator gets mashed and you’re thrown right through the back of the seat. Brilliant use of dynamics. Next, ‘The Anchorite’ trucks along between the anthemic, the demonic, and the borderline-shoegazer-psychedelic in such natural fashion you’d think Satan playing cock-rock on acid was an everyday occurrence. And ‘The Everbearing’, the eight-plus minute closer, is a full-steam-ahead locomotive. It starts like a punch in the gut and hardly lets up the pressure. The Middle-Eastern flavor mentioned a second ago that here runs atop straight-up thrash metal is a glorious final showcase for the excellent, excellent dual-guitar work found throughout the entire record. The chorus: easily the highlight of any Kvelertak album. And when ‘The Everbearing’ does slow down for a bit in the middle, it’s like talking a brief walk along a twisting, again almost psychedelic, corridor only to round a corner and suddenly, unexpectedly, and yet effortlessly, with a single small step, finding yourself back where you started. Then as you begin the journey again, you find yourself not on familiar ground at all but on a completely different trajectory, culminating in possibly the most bone-crushingly dense moment on the album, before finally settling into the maniacally urgent closing riff. Breathtaking craftsmanship.
Year of Sleep would very possibly make my album of the year without the title track. Just as possible, though, is that if nothing but the title track were offered, it would still earn that distinction. ‘Year of Sleep’, the song, is utterly magnificent. The first two and half minutes is a slow-ish, almost dirgey yet oddly bright, ever-building movement, very much like a condensed version of the beginning of Isis’ ‘In Fiction’, from Panopticon. This leads to one of the mightiest kicks I’ve ever encountered. It is godawful heavy and driving and just so sweet. Thirty seconds later the band is downright swinging. Groovy, ass-shaking stuff. And the song just continues to morph and evolve, teasing riffs, coming back only briefly to earlier sections. Then it hits the 4:40 mark. I highly recommend listening to this song in particular at louder than normal volume wearing headphones. I can guarantee you will feel the shift at 4:40 in the deepest pit of your stomach. The first time I heard it, it literally felt as if I’d just crested the top of a rollercoaster. My stomach was in my throat. I thought the floor had dropped out from under me. If I hadn’t been sitting down already, I believe I would have fallen. Never in my nearly 42 years has a piece of music, any music, done that. It is a moment I will clearly remember for the rest of my life, and for that alone Pyres has my undying admiration. Perhaps most amazing, though, is the prog-metal dual-guitar part that follows with absolutely no break in the emotional flow of the song. This shouldn’t be possible. And really, the song just goes on from there, rising and falling with not a wasted or extraneous second. It ends with a minute and a half of a 24-beat long riff that both plums the depths and soars in ecstasy. All told, a truly epic and spectacular journey.
So now do yourself a real favor. Get this album, along with a nice big cushion to collapse on because Pyres’ Year of Sleep will leave you a wobbly, week-kneed wreck.
